Black Friday has been and gone yet we are still very busy finishing off the last orders as many of these specials were not just on Friday, but ran for the entire weekend which is milking the event properly. I cannot remember fully when Black Friday was first introduced but do remember many of the specials were whilst stocks lasted and the specials were one day only. That soon changed with the online as platforms made sure they had sufficient levels of stock and penalize suppliers if they run out. Rather just call it Black Weekend as otherwise it is very misleading as it is an extended sale. Maybe in a few years time it will be a week long event.
I have never been a fan of this marketing event which was initially designed to clear old stock making room for the new Christmas stock lines. That type of thinking soon changed with retailers seeing this as an opportunity of having two Christmas type sales boom periods. Walmart was known for the saying of stack em high and watch them fly because their sales strategy has always been based on volume.
Just to give you an idea when we left work this evening there were still two containers waiting in a queue to be off loaded and another 3 trucks waiting to be loaded. The crazy part is by only having one fork lift this is slowing us down working on one truck at a time. The rest of the year having one fork lift is all you need. You just have to laugh as what else can you do?
Things should quieten down by next week for the following two weeks before the Christmas part hits in earnest. If your product is not in certain retailers warehouses by the week of the 28th November you have missed Christmas. The retailers warehouses are that jam packed receiving stock is impossible and the queues getting in can be up to 48 hours even if you have a set booking time. I call it organised chaos as nothing is organised as everyone finds out that new swanky system they had put in place actually does not work. I have been doing this long enough to know there is no shortcuts and people who know what they are doing need to be on the floor and not having coffee in some hidden away office. This can run like clock work if you have the right people and forget the new systems.
This Black Friday so far and we are a small warehouse with a small team have processed 32 x 40 ft containers which can take anywhere between 45 minutes and 5 hours depending on the product. If the container is weights you want to run as this is a proper ball ache.
The sales are still being processed as they can take up to 72 hours to fulfil and as of last night we had processed 2020 orders. Of those orders the only ones I am really interested in is the punching bags where we are sitting around 192 sales so 200 will be passed by tomorrow. The not so fun part is I know this has been stolen from another order that was being prepared for another retailers order scheduled for delivery this Thursday.
The online sales is the unknown and you cannot predict of forecast what the sales numbers will be. Next year the hope is we will be a little better prepared and actually have stock ready to go out. The filler for the punching bags is the problem and may or may not still be an issue next year. 10 tons of material arrived today and do think it is on one of the containers waiting in the queue tonight so we should be good to go fulfilling any orders this month.